The Last Compromise (33 page)

‘I
said relax. And your Anneli can relax, too. Her colleague Zayek has been covering
up the missing uranium. There will be no investigation into her unit.’

Viktor’s
answer would perhaps give him away, but there was only breathing at the other
end of the line.

Hans
continued, ‘You gave me a ride to Brussels to convince me the theft was a
Russian scheme, though.’

‘I
wanted to hear what your assumptions were. You were suspecting this Zayek,
that’s all I needed to know. And now it turns out that it was actually true,
too.’

‘You
wanted to keep Anneli out of trouble because you were sleeping with her,’ Hans said.

‘I
love her,’ Viktor replied, without hesitation. Perhaps he felt they were now
beyond tiptoeing around each other’s private sensitivities, or perhaps he would
have answered in this way at any other stage, too. ‘I met my wife early in my
life. And I met Anneli much later. It could have been the other way around, but
it wasn’t. I married the woman I loved. And then I met the woman I also would
have married, had I met the two in reverse order.’

It
didn’t seem like Viktor had already heard about Mäkinen’s death. Hans gave
Viktor a second before asking his next question.

‘Why
did you keep helping me with the statistics, then?’

‘Why
should I not have? I didn’t know anything was really going on in the first
place, and then I also wanted to find out who was doing it.’

There
was some more breathing. Viktor had no idea it was her. His secret love affair
hadn’t told him a thing.

‘Now
you know,’ Hans said. ‘It was Zayek.’

‘It’s
been very tough,’ Viktor said. ‘My wife still doesn’t know.’ Another pause. ‘I have
ended things with Anneli yesterday. You know, broke up. I think she was through
with me, too. It was just an episode. She never stopped loving her real life.’

Hans
waited.

‘You
know, maybe that’s for the better anyway,’ Viktor said. ‘Even if I forget about
the children. Let’s say I marry Anneli now. There will always be someone else,
someone I will meet even later than her.’

‘You
do as you like,’ Hans said, and hung up. He checked the printer, which was
still rattling along, and turned back to his e-mails.

There
was a standard notification that the nuclear reports investigation was closed,
with the request to finalise the dossier for archiving. At that time Hans had already
been sitting around in Rotterdam, reading celebrity news.

Two
more standard notifications, telling him that he had been assigned new cases in
the meantime. He did not open them to see the details.

A
message from Caitlin from money-laundering from the same afternoon. She had
heard about Zayek’s death the day before, had seen that Hans hadn’t returned to
the office, and was worried where he was.
Take care. Caitlin.

Another
message, with the scanned birth certificates of the parents of the director’s
consultant attached. The proof whether the person she had hired was her nephew
or not. Tienhoven must have approved and forwarded the request for the
certificates himself, in Hans’s absence. Hans skipped that message as well
without opening it.

Then
there was a message sent by Siim, again from the same afternoon, when Hans had
been getting ready to spend the night in a Rotterdam prison cell:
Hans,
something happened to Clarissa while she was in town, please call. Siim.

Hans
checked the printer, it needed more paper. Hans opened the lid and fed it a
fresh stack of blank sheets. He pressed the button to tell the machine to
continue working, and looked back at his screen.

There
was no need to call Siim. Whatever had happened to Clarissa when the Russian
had taken her pictures, it wouldn’t change Hans’s interest in giving him his
box back. Although the Russian could have taken her captive, which Hans would
need to know before making contact.

He
picked up the phone and called Siim’s mobile number which the e-mail had
mentioned. Hans didn’t know it by heart, it had been saved in his mobile phone,
which was gone.

‘I
got your message, Siim,’ Hans said. ‘I’m back now.’

‘I
don’t know what to say Hans,’ Siim said. ‘I don’t know what to think about you.
Maybe it’s not your fault, or maybe I should never talk to you again.’

‘Where
is she?’

‘She’s
right here in Petten. It was, I don’t know. He made her strip, Hans. And he…’

Hans
waited.

Siim
whispered, ‘And he took pictures of her.’

Meaning
there hadn’t been anything else.

‘The
man was a professional assassin,’ Hans said while looking whether there was
enough space for the printed pages or whether he needed to take the first pile
out. ‘It could have been much worse. But it’s over now.’

‘Let’s
talk maybe after Easter,’ Siim said. ‘Give it some time first, okay?’

‘Is
that Hans?’ It was Clarissa’s voice in the background. There would be either
reproaches or forgiveness or more questions from her. All of that could wait.

‘Yes,’
Hans said to Siim. ‘Let’s do that.’

He
hung up.

The
most recent message on the screen was from Tienhoven, from Friday night. By
that time Hans had already been trying to get some sleep in the prison cell.
Hans,
I am on sick leave for one or two weeks. It’s the heart again. Don’t do
anything stupid while I’m gone. Willem
.

That
was all.

Hans
closed his work e-mail and opened his private e-mail account. There were four new
messages from Julia. He closed the programme without opening any of them.

Then
he opened the browser and looked up the address of the Estonian chief prosecutor’s
office. They had moved to a new building. He wrote the address on one of the
two blank envelopes that he’d put on his desk.

The
printer had finished. Hans took out another blank piece of paper and wrote, in
Estonian:
Don’t tell the Commission, don’t mention me, bring him down on
your own, and hurry. One week, two weeks maximum. If Saar says I came to talk
to him about this, ignore it. Good luck. H.

He
put the printed Saar file inside the envelope, together with the handwritten note,
and sealed it. He left his office and put it in the outgoing mail tray in the
corridor. On Monday it would be machine-stamped with the Commission’s logo, but
that was fine. His former colleagues in Tallinn would know anyway who the
package was from, it wasn’t strictly speaking anonymous.

When
he came back he sat down again and looked up the phone number of the Russian embassy
in Brussels. There was a twenty-four-hour number one could call to ask for
consular assistance.

Hans
dialled the number. He heard a female voice answer the call.

‘Rossiyskoye
konsulstvo.’

‘This
is Hans Tamberg. I have something that belongs to you.’

The
woman replied immediately, ‘There is a car waiting outside your office
building. Give it to the passenger.’

A
pause.

Hans
asked, ‘How will I know he’s with you?’

‘The
car has diplomatic license plates.’

‘I
need to be sure, I don’t want to give it to the wrong person,’ Hans said. ‘What’s
the passenger’s name?’

‘Anatoly.’

‘Are
you kidding me? His last name.’

‘Slavkin.
He will say to you what you said on the ferry.’

Another
pause.

‘Okay,’
Hans said and hung up.

He
couldn’t see the street outside the building’s entrance from his office window,
but there was no doubt that the Russians had been aware of his arrival and had
moved into position to intercept him on his way out of the building. And Hans
even preferred this to going to the embassy himself, or to risking sending it
by mail, or to waiting any longer in general.

The
calculation was simple. They wanted the box, Hans needed to give it to them as
quickly as possible to protect his blood relatives, and that was it. There
would be no more games or brilliant moves. No appeal to the police, no e-mails
to the media, no attempt to blackmail the Russians into anything, or to play
them off against some other country. The authorities involved had already
reached a mutual agreement about the incident in Luxembourg. And the Russians
weren’t hiding the fact that they had a stake, they had even sent an official
embassy car. There was no way of knowing whether the transfer of the box truly
ended the matter between Hans and the Russian on the ferry, if only because, for
all the Russians knew, the box could have undergone extensive analysis in a lab
in the meantime. But the Russian on the ferry hadn’t seemed worried about that.

Hans
put the black box inside the second blank envelope and sealed it, too. Then he hid
the envelope inside his jacket, shut down his computer, turned off the lights
and left his office as deserted as all the others on his floor.

***

The
elevator doors opened and Hans stepped outside, walked past the guard and left
the building. As promised, a black Mercedes with diplomatic licence plates was
parked beneath a street lamp across the street, its front lights pointing to
the left. As Hans approached it, the rear window behind the driver’s seat was
lowered, and a pale young man peered outside.

‘Do
you have it?’, he said to Hans in Russian.

Hans
asked, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Give
me the box, that’s my name.’

‘My
instructions about verification are clear,’ Hans said, turned left, stepped on
the pavement on the car’s side of the street and started walking away from the
car, in the direction it would also have been heading.

‘Stop,
wait!’

Hans
stopped and turned around. He waited for the man to come out. The man was
waiting for Hans to come back.

When
neither thing happened, Hans turned around again and continued walking. He
heard the engine start and the car slowly follow him.

The
car came to a stop next to him. Now the rear window behind the passenger’s seat
opened. The Russian had needed to move over.

He
said, ‘Anatoly Slavkin.’

Hans
asked, ‘Why are you here?’

‘To
receive the black box.’

‘What
did I say to him?’

Without
grinning Slavkin said a few vulgar but correct words.

Hans
opened his jacket, took out the envelope with the box and gave it to him. He
took it, opened the envelope, almost broke off his fingernails trying to open
the box, checked the serial number and nodded.

‘Proshay,’
he said to Hans.

As
he raised the window he said to the driver, ‘Davay, poyekhali.’

The
driver complied and the car drove off.

Proshay
meant goodbye, in the definitive sense of farewell rather in the sense of a
temporary separation until the next encounter. A mildly comforting nuance, but better
than nothing. As for the box, the transaction was complete. Time to go home.

***

Hans
didn’t feel like taking any form of public transport. He’d spent a lot of time
sitting around on the airplane from Helsinki and on the bus from Brussels
airport to the anti-fraud building. The night was pleasantly chilly; no wind,
no rain, no frost. Fresh air filled his nostrils and lungs. He kept his jacket open
to let the air cool and freshen his shirt. His face still hurt a little but it
was bearable. The walk home, through the yellow glow of street lanterns beneath
the clear black sky, would take him forty minutes.

What
had he gone through? What had he achieved? There wasn’t much to be ashamed of,
and not much to be proud of. He was alert, and he was numb at the same time.
And for what?

He
knew now that he was willing to take risks in the interest of worthy
objectives. He knew that he could have made a difference for the security of
his home country, or for the well-being of the continent that his country was
part of. But he hadn’t made any difference, because he had stumbled into a
situation and pursued the wrong end of events. He had uncovered a criminal
operation that would surely be rebuilt, and that would then continue with or
without him, through the same channels or through different channels, and to
the benefit of the same people or of different people. He hadn’t even disrupted
it, because it had already been unravelling on its own. He had put his family in
danger, and there was nothing to show for it. Just a banal object which he had
pocketed and then given back, without knowing what it was. Next time he
wouldn’t pay the price.

Not
unless it was for something more meaningful.

Hans
smirked at the thought. There would be no next time. Monday meant reporting for
duty and introducing himself to whatever boss they’d appoint to replace
Tienhoven. Willem. Poor man.

Hans
walked through the streets of the city area adjacent to the European quarter.
As usual it was dirty. On hot days it always was organically smelly from
various sorts of food. As usual, heaps of cardboard boxes were lying outside closed
shops on the pavement. Brussels featured the glitziest hotels on the filthiest of
squares, and serious jewellery shops on decrepit narrow streets. The
dilapidation was the most authentic aspect of this urban world that for the
rest featured so many things that looked artificial. The glitzy hotels, for
example. Or the transplanted European institutions with their transplanted
staff, which included himself.